99% Invisible - 492- Inheriting Froebel's Gifts

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

In the late 1700s, a young man named Friedrich Froebel was on track to become an architect when a friend convinced him to pursue a path toward education instead. And in changing course, Froebel arguably ended up having more influence on the world of architecture and design than any single architect -- all because Friedrich Froebel created kindergarten.Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, John, was an architect, but his most famous creation wasn’t a building. It was a toy set that kids have been playing with for over 100 years. Inheriting Froebel's Gifts

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Back in 2018, Kurt Colson and I went on a tour, performing a 99PI story live in cities along the East Coast, and Swan Rial and her band provided musical accompaniment. It was so much fun. On stage, we told the audience about a key development that helped shape a generation of modern artists and designers. The stage version was relatively short, but we later expanded the piece into a full episode.

We have that story for you today, with an additional brand new related story about how Frank Lloyd Wright's son, John, went on to create one of the most iconic building toy sets in American history. That's a story that Kurt has been dying to tell for a really long time. So stay tuned for that. But first, here's Frobo's gifts. One upon a time, there was a boy named Friedrich Frobo. His early life reads like one of those dark, old,

German fairy tales. His mother died in 1783, right after he was born. And so Friedrich Frobel had a lonely childhood. He spent his days in the woods looking at trees and rocks and flowers, wandering the dense forests of Thuringia and what was then, Prussia. It's a lush region, sometimes referred to today as Das Grünerhärts Deutschlands, the green heart of Germany. That's Kurt Colstead, he produced this story. I actually lived near Thuringia when I was a kid, and the forest there are…

I'm so rough! Simply magical, and I can really see how Frobo became enthralled. He looked at rocks, he studied the trees, he worked with a forester for a while, he was an apprentice forester. That's Norman Brosterman, he's an author who studied Friedrich Frobo for years. Brosterman says that Frobo worked for a time as a land surveyor and even served in the military. He was skilled at drafting and geometry, and at one point became convinced he should be an architect. He did everything you need to become an architect. He took all the right classes.

But he didn't become an architect. A friend convinced him to become an architect, you took all the right classes. But he didn't become an architect. A friend convinced them to become an educator instead. And in changing course, Frobol arguably ended up having more influence in the world of architecture and design than any single architect. And that's because Friedrich Frobol created kindergarten. I believe kindergarten had a tremendous influence on the 20th century. It impacted all parts of society, of course, including art and architecture. If you've ever looked at a piece of abstract art or modernist

architecture and thought, my kindergartener could have made that, well, that may be more true than you realize. The kindergarten was the product of Fervil's decades of experience in a wide range of fields, but the foundations of it were built on the principles of Johann Pestelotzi. Pestelotzi is considered the father of modern education, which basically means they will learn better if you treat them well, rather than hit them with sticks, you know. In addition to the whole not-hitting kids with sticks thing, Pestilotse emphasized physical activity and active learning over rope memorization and repetition.

In in particular, he felt that kids should draw. Pestilotse was a early childhood educator who had incorporated pedagogical drawings in the curriculum. That's author and Cooper Union professor Tamar Zinger. And basically he is one of the first who thought that drawing should be part of any school curriculum and should be taught to the very, very young. Fribble worked for a time at a school based on these principles. And he built on what he learned from Pestilotse, incorporating his own ideas along the way

about how children should be taught. Pestilotse was especially busy with breaking down the two-dimensional world, but what Frobel did is break down the three-dimensional world. Frobel realized he wanted kids to go beyond just drawing lines on pages. He wanted them to learn through the physical manipulation

of objects. Frobel wanted children to play with toys, objects designed and crafted specifically for educational play. Now this doesn't sound unusual today, but it really was back in the early 1800s. Children used to go to work with their parents. They used to sit by their parents' side and they would play with the detritus of the parents' work. For example, the candle maker would make wax figurines with the leftover wax.

The wooden blocks were only made from the leftover wood from the carpenter. So it was always from the left over wood from the carpenter. So it was always from the left over material. Frobel wanted to build real educational intent into objects of play, but it took him decades to come to this key realization, and a lot of time observing children and nature. He was put in charge of an orphanage for a while, overseeing young children,

but he also studied the natural sciences. In particular, the emerging discipline of crystallography. Well, it turns out that the man who invented kindergarten was a crystal scientist. He worked with the foremost crystallographer of the time in Berlin. Where most people saw nature in big, flowing organic shapes like hills and plants and animals, Frobles zoomed in to study the straight lines and the geometric forms of crystals. To try to understand how the physical world around him is actually made. Frobles came to see crystal structures as the building blocks of reality. And this alchemy of crystals and the teaching of Pestilotsse and a childhood alone in the woods all crystallized

into a solid vision. In 1837, when he was 55 years old, Frobel founded the very first kindergarten in Badlachenberg, Germany. And his intention was to create an educational system for children who could not yet read or write. So he thought to use geometric forms as a way to teach complex and simple lessons all through play.

If you can harness play, you can teach kids a lot of things. The word kindergarten cleverly encompass two different ideas. Kids would play in and learn from nature, but they would also themselves be nurtured and nourished, like plants in a garden. And the key to it all was a set of deceptively simple-looking toys. These were Frobo's gifts. They're called gifts because they were to draw out the gifts of the children.

In German, of course, the phrase, Frobel's Gifts is rolled together into a single word. Frobelgaben. Frobel's Gifts were meant to be given in a particular order, the toys growing more complex over time, teaching different lessons about shape, structure, and perception along the way. The first of Frobel's G' gifts was a soft knitted ball. A wool ball.

And it's basically the first gift a child could get at the age of six weeks. Then the child would graduate to another ball, roughly the same size as the first. But this one is not soft, it's hard. A wooden maple wooden ball and it has a surface, it is smooth, it can roll. And then they are given the cube. And the cube is an opposite. It has sides, it has edges, it is sharp edges, it has points. The cube cannot roll. Kids are asked to enumerate the differences

between the two. And then they get a cylinder which combines elements of both the ball and the cube and it blows their little minds. Each new gift would get more and more interactive and more complex. Some were designed to be home from a string and spun in the air. And as they rotate, some very interesting forms are created that are not visible when the form is stationary. Like a cube, for instance, looks like a cylinder when you spin it around fast enough. He wants the children to start to see that there are some invisible parts,

contained within the visible. Next up came objects made up of smaller objects, visible parts contained within the visible. Next up came objects made up of smaller objects, like a cube that breaks down into a bunch of little cubes. And then the toys would ship from being about perception to being about creation. They would become more versatile, client and constructive, blocks gave way to paper, string, wire, little sticks and peas that could be connected and stacked into structures.

The objects would get more abstract and creative, leading to the final lesson. The last is really just working freely with clay. Clay being the most malleable of all, it's rigid and it's soft, and there's a whole range of things a child could build with it. But even at this final stage, this wasn't the kind of creative, free-for-all we tend to associate with childhood play. Frobo had children sitting at desks, little workstations with grids laid out on them. So it's not free play.

The fact that the table has an underlying grid is very much at the root of the directed play, you follow instructions, and there's an underlying order. And so in this very structured, very Germanic way, the gifts encourage students to think abstractly, interlate ideas, objects, and symbols. A set of blocks could be used to teach counting. Then the child could use those same blocks to build a house, and then tell stories of a family living in that house So they were modeling the world in different ways all using the same set of objects

The children realized that they can create new shapes and new forms that They create on top of the gridded table. These kindergarten weren't just schools They were art schools without other sex and drugs and clothes and threats. They were places that taught about shape and form and color. And when kindergarten graduates went out into the world, the world changed. The kind of art that was being made in the 19th century is really different than the kind of art that was made after kids went to kindergarten. Expressionist, cubist and surrealist artists like Paul Clay and Vasily Kandinsky attended early

kindergarten. Others like Pete Montreal encountered Frobeleon methods as teachers. And when you look at a lot of their work alongside illustrations in kindergarten teacher guides, the resemblance is uncanny. And it wasn't just artists. Kindergarten influence designers too. Walt the Gropius started the Bauhaus in 1919. Gropius decided to hire a kindergarten teacher as the first hire of this famous school of design.

So the Bauhaus had its adult design students doing geometric exercises, much like those found in kindergarten. And the effects of Frobo's work on design education rippled out beyond Germany. And some of his most explicit and direct influences can be found among the world's most famous architects. Frankly, I write the American architect Influences can be found among the world's most famous architects. Frank Lloyd Wright, the American architect, is the great child of the kindergarten. You can find the kindergarten and everything Wright ever did.

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in 1867 around the time kindergarten were gaining traction in the United States, and his mom took classes in kindergarten education. Wright never went to architecture school, but he recalls that when he was young, his mother brought home a set of Frobles gifts. Wright said that the moment he was given Frobles gifts, he, quote, began to be an architect. He went on to say,

for several years, I sat at that little kindergarten table ruled by lines about four inches apart. But the smooth cardboard triangles and maple wood blocks were most important. All are in my fingers to this day. And right wasn't the only one. European modernist Le Corbusier also never went to architecture school, but he did attend forbelly in schools in Switzerland. The gridded geometries and repeated patterns of the Kibusie's modernist houses and apartment blocks look like they were drawn on those gridded kindergarten desks.

The Kibusie and Frank Lloyd Wright, considered by some the two most important architects of the 20th century, had exactly the same childhood education. And then there's Buckminster Fuller, famous for pioneering geodesic domes made up of triangles. Fuller discovered his greatest engineering insight as a kindergartener, connecting for Belyon Pies and Sticks. If you know Buckminster Fuller, this is the thing he's most famous for. You know, the domes made out of peas and sticks basically, nodes and rods. So he learned that in kindergarten.

Obviously not everyone who attended kindergarten became a Frank Lloyd Wright or a Locke or Bucie or a Bucky, but the abstract lessons of kindergarten tilled and fertilized the ground so the seeds of their ideas could find purchase in the world. Abstraction was accepted fairly quickly in Paris and in Europe, perhaps because children had already been doing a lot of the same kinds of things for many decades, that was one of the reasons that they were not so shocked when art turned in that direction. So in terms of 20th century art and design, kindergarten was an absolute triumph. But Friedrich Frobo only got to witness the spread of his vision for about a decade before it was cut short.

In the 1850s, the Prussian government was cracking down on the broal thought. And in 1851, they issued the kindergarten for boat, a national ban on kindergartens. And Frobo died the very next year and you know you wonder if he died of a broken heart in 1852 Of course who knows but even though the ban slowed the expansion of kindergartens in Germany It didn't stop the idea from spreading elsewhere far from it a lot of free thinking the bruls left Germany and they brought from it. A lot of free thinking liberals left Germany and they brought Frobo's kindergarten with them. So his disciples, they were so dedicated to the work that they immigrated, many of them to the United States, and basically because of the ban, that's what led to the forebours

of theories to be known around the world. And the most dedicated kindergarten evangelists were women. As Tamar Zinger points out in her book, architecture and play, Frobel believed that women should play a leading role in educating children. To be clear, Frobel wasn't exactly a feminist. He had very traditional ideas about gender roles, and believed that it was the role of women to nurture children, as mannies and kindergarten teachers.

But regardless of Frobl's reasoning, teaching kindergarten was a rare opportunity. It was one of the only jobs you could get as a young woman. There weren't many jobs. And it was women who drew up and translated the lesson books that would be used to teach a generation of young artists and designers. By 1885, there were over 500 kindergarten in America, and they were taught

primarily by women. And you might be thinking, hey, I went to kindergarten. Why didn't I grow up with this incredibly dramatic, amacutly planned sequence of toys? Well, ironically, the passion of some of kindergarten's biggest proponents is part of the reason why you probably didn't grow up playing with Frorobles' gifts. The first kindergarten in the United States started in Watertown, Wisconsin in 1856, but it was German language only. The educator Elizabeth P. Body was inspired by this kindergarten and went on to found the first American English-language kindergarten in Boston in 1860.

P. Body wanted to spread the teachings of Frobl to his many children as possible. And so she reached out to Milton Bradley, the famous board game maker. She wanted Bradley to mass produce Frobl's gifts so that he could be accessible to everyone. And Milton Bradley having heard her was convinced. And since that moment, it turned his entire attention

to the manufacture of Fuable blocks and gifts. But where Peabody saw an educational ideal, Bradley saw a business opportunity. Bradley began adding a bunch of new toys into the mix, and then other manufacturers got in on the game too, making all different kinds of stuff and just calling it all kindergarten toys. He just made up stuff and he said,

this is kindergarten and this is kindergarten, this is kindergarten, it's not necessarily fruibles kindergarten. The simple abstractions of Frobo's gifts had gone commercial. And within a few years, Elizabeth Peabody went from promoting the manufacture of kindergarten toys to speaking out against it. The interest of manufacturers and of merchants

of the gifts and materials is a snare. It has already corrupted the simplicity of Frobo in Europe and America, for his idea was to use elementary forms exclusively and simple materials. Even the word kindergarten itself became a generic term, a catch-all for early childhood education of all different kinds. These days most kindergarten are a lot different from anything Frobo imagined, and few kids encounter those early gifts in any kind of sequence, if at all. But kids still play with blocks.

I mean, I really think that it's because of Frobo or Foybo or however it's correctly pronounced, that children in the Western world play with blocks. But I think also blocks are constant across a variety of educational systems, because there's so much in them that they can teach. That's Alexandra Lang, an architecture critic and author of The Design of Childhood, have the material world shapes independent kids.

The block is this incredibly malleable toy that can be used in all of these different ways. Proble wasn't the only one to see educational value in blocks. In the early 1900s, Carolyn Pratt debuted her unit blocks. Unit blocks, which are essentially those classic brick-shaped pale wood blocks that really I can't think of any early childhood classroom I've been to that doesn't have those blocks. In some ways all modern toy blocks were influenced by Frobo. Tinker toys and LEGO and connects they're all about understanding shape and form and making connections, but they also represented a parcher from Frobo's highly organized and linear approach.

You know, the Frobo blocks you were supposed to proceed from one to 20 through his exercises, whereas the unit blocks are much more open and they're more like we tend to encounter blocks today. These days, we don't think that blocks need an accompanying gridded desk or a syllabus of objects. Now, blocks are creative tools for children that give them a chance to use their imagination

as they build houses and cities and interact with each other. That's what I see when my boys play with Legos or build castles and Minecraft. There isn't this sense of strict progression. It's more a sense that these blocks are a tool for children to recreate their own world as best they can. And who knows how many architects, builders, designers, and thinkers all started with these literal building blocks, probillion or otherwise, learning creativity through construction. Frank Lloyd Wright's son, John, also went to kindergarten and also became an architect.

His most famous creation wasn't a building, but little kids have been building with it for over 100 years. That story, after this. So I'm back with Kurt Colestad to talk about another designer and Frank Lloyd Wright's family, his son, John, who is also educated using Frobeleian methods, so we're gonna dive deeper into John's story. But what is really great about this story

is that it culminates into one very particular design that is his claim to fame. Yes, very much so. And it all started with Frank's mother, Anna, who is John's grandmother. Frank wrote and talked a lot about how Frobel's gifts led him to architecture. But it didn't hurt that his mom had wanted him

to be an architect from the very beginning. So she brought home Frobel's gifts as part of this grand agenda and sure enough, Frank Winid architecture as planned and eventually he had kids of his own. Yeah. But what I know about Frank Lloyd Wright's personal life is that his family relationship with his kids and stuff was extremely fraught and difficult. Yeah, there was a lot of heartache in that family or really more accurately families

because he married multiple times. And the care of his children in the midst of all this often fell to the women in his life. And early in his career, while he's busy practicing architecture Chicago, his mother, along with his first wife, Catherine, are basically next door teaching the kids. They effectively ran a kind of neighborhood kindergarten.

And in that, they use the same toys and methods that Anna had used with Frank. So in a way, they were shaping the next generation of rights, maybe even with this idea still in mind that they could also become architects. Yeah. Well, she did a good job the first time. Yeah. Yeah. This future star architect, and now she has the kit all ready to go to work on the next

one. Yeah, exactly. And sure enough, John writes second son eventually did follow his father's footsteps. Like he went to school and dropped out and he farmed for a while. And he didn't always get along with his dad so they drifted apart. But after John moved out to California, he started drafting. And after that, he started practicing architecture. And so after these years of a strange man, did they come together

just like, because they're architects, you know, in a way, yes, like this provided a kind of point of reconnection for them, right? And they ended up actually working together. They traveled as a team to Japan for this really big and prestigious commission, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. So while working on this project, both of the rights learned a lot about regional design strategies, like how to build foundations in Japan, and these really very, really into beautiful interlocking wood joinery techniques. So I've seen some of this joinery, but for people who can't quite picture it, could you describe it? I would love to be able to. It's really hard.

But I can try. The basic idea is that instead of bluer nails, you could build structures made entirely out of these wooden pieces that slot and lock into one another. The actual slot work, you really should just go online and look up because it's beautiful and it's intricate and very hard to describe. But it all dates back to these ancient Chinese temples that were built this way. And later, Japan essentially adapted that technology to better withstand earthquakes between the flexibility of these joints and the flexibility of wood itself as a material,

a whole building can essentially sway instead of just shaking and maybe even shaking itself apart during an earthquake. And that's particularly true if they're set up on a more flexible foundation. Okay, so Frank and John, they're in Japan, they're learning about joinery, they're learning about foundations, they're still going to follow this regional architectural wisdom. Did they end up employing some of this for the final like imperial hotel that they built? Oh yeah, like for example, they used this floating foundation technique and the design worked. Shortly after it was built, Tokyo was hit

with a big earthquake, but the hotel survived. Still, despite the success of the project, it became a catalyst for another falling out between Frank and John over salary this time. But that experience of moving away from his father again led John to what became his claim to fame, which was architectural and built on all of his experiences to date, but it wasn't actually a building at all. John's most popular and lasting design legacy was a set of modular toy building blocks.

In 1916, John Lloyd Wright invented Lincoln logs. Wow. Lincoln logs. I am very familiar with Lincoln logs. People who maybe can't picture them and I pity you if you can't. They're primarily made up of these long rounded wooden sticks. They have notches and they can be stacked like a log cabin. And some of the logs are shorter so that you can make doors and windows, but it's really kind of this lovely, elegant way of making a tiny log cabin. Yeah. And so John came up with this really cleverly simple design. And pretty quickly, they went into production towards the end of World War One, which turned out to be for two to timing

for Lincoln logs, if not for anybody else, because during the war a lot of metal was rerouted to support allied forces. So what was more readily available and a lot of metal toys ended up disappearing from the shelves, right? Oh, interesting. But what's amazing about them is they're still around today. Do you know how much they evolved from that original design that John did in 1916? Yeah, I've actually looked up sets from different eras and remarkably they haven't changed that much. My dad had a set when he was growing up, that was a lot like mine that he got me when I was a kid. And today, my niece's, his grandchildren, still enjoy playing with that set that he gave me. Yeah, it's kind of like the Frobo's gifts that we talked about. You know, like they're passed on from generation to generation.

Yeah. Well, they're passed on like Frobo's gifts, but they're not exactly like Frobo's gifts, at least according to Professor Barzinger, who we talked to earlier about these, right? She sees Lincoln logs as being too limited. You can only make a log cabin. And the first one that he invented, you could only make one log cabin. So I think they're very, very different from the various systems that play with the horrible blocks and the open-endedness and also the abstract nature of what you make. So I think the Lincoln logs are very opposite. They really make one log cabin, you know?

And they're beautiful as far as the miniature of a log cabin goes, but that's where it ends. But a beautiful miniature log cabin isn't pretty good end result. There are worst places to end up. But you know, despite whatever you or I or her might think, they were really popular, and eventually they were inducted

into the National Toy Hall of Fame. Yeah. I mean, they deserve a place in the Toy Hall of Fame. And the thing is, they are toys. I mean, professors, I may be comparing them to educational tools, which are the frivolous gifts, but as toys, they're intuitive, they're easy to learn, and you can make a little log cabin.

Like, how can you find that? Yeah, and it might be a little bit of a stretch, but I would even argue that in a way they are more flexible than they look to if you use your imagination. For example, my nieces populate them with toy figures, and they like essentially animate them and bring them to life with stories. So I think they're not necessarily

as limiting as they first appear. But even just looking at the toys themselves, they are pretty clever in how they fit together. It's all pretty well designed. Yeah, you do end up with a nice log cabin, even if you don't do anything else with it. Right. But while log cabins,

you're like given John's exposure to this wood joinery into pan in temples, like you would imagine that he would make it so that he could build temples or something, or something more than just log cabins. These sets came out in the early 1900s. And that building type, the log cabin, really tapped into a progressive era nostalgia for frontier living. Yeah, living with nature, you know, in a picturesque log cabin, smoke coming out of the chimney, the long winding river, trying not to die of dysentery. Exactly, Oregon Trail style. And so there was that log cabin association broadly, and then there was President Abraham Lincoln, who was born in log cabin in Kentucky, and who a lot of people, of course, associate with log cabins in general.

So by some accounts, that's where the Lincoln part of Lincoln logs comes from. Yeah. Yeah. But it's not the only theory because Lincoln was also Frank's original middle name. Wait, so Frank Lloyd Ryan was actually born Frank Lincoln right? Yeah, he was. And he only later changed it from Lincoln to Lloyd to honor his mother's family,

the Lloyd Joneses. Huh. Huh. And to this day, different sources out there will tell you very definitively that it was one of these or the other that either John was inspired by Abe Lincoln or that it was all a tribute to his dad. Well, I have to be on team Abe Lincoln and this one because I mean, come on, it was his dad's former middle name. It is a bit of a stretch and it's really fascinating to be about it,

is that you see these statements made unambiguously, right? Like, no, it was definitely this explanation. Yeah, I mean, especially because they had their, you know, falling out period and he was a challenging man. And these were pretty adjacent, too, right? Like later John would come around and say, really nice things about his father, this book he wrote. But this was right after their kind of breakup. So I don't think he was exactly feeling in the mood to, you know, design a tribute to

his father. And then there's this other piece of evidence. It's kind of compelling because Abraham Lincoln actually appeared on what I think was the very first design of the box for these toys. So, you know, I agree. That seems like the more logical explanation. I think that settles it. Yeah. I think we might have just figured out the answer. Anybody to squeeze? Let us know. But I think we got it. Fair. I think we, but it just figured out the answer. If anybody disagrees, let us know. But I think we got it fair enough. I mean, you got to imagine that it was really difficult for John to grow up in the shadow of Frank Lloyd Wright, who is a very big personality and, you know, very full of himself. And hard to get along with. And hard to get along with. But I find it really nice that John found his own niche in the end, despite the family

difficulties. Yeah, the whole extended right family is full of so many tragic stories. But in a way, John came out of it and built something kind of incredible. And while a lot of people might not even ever see a Frank Lloyd Wright house in person, let alone go into one. A lot of people will play with Lincoln logs and pass them down to their kids who might then pass them down to their kids. So they're very different legacies, but they're both really kind of beautiful ones too. Well, this is a fascinating addendum to the story.

Well, thank you so much, Kurt. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, Robin. 99% of his book was produced this week by Kurt Coleset and Emmett Fitzgerald. The original story was edited by Avery Truffman and mixed by Sharif Yusuf. Mixed on this episode by Martin Gonzales, music by our director of sound, Swan Rial. Our executive producer is Delaney Hall. The rest of the team includes Vivian Le Le, Joe Rosenberg, Christopher Johnson, Chris Baroube, Lashmodon, Jason De Leon, Sophia Kletzger, and me Roman Mars.

We are a part of the Stitcher & Series XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI Orc. We're on Instagram and ready to. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org. How is that all? Stitcher? Yes it is, I got it as a gift. I just got one of those for... It's a really sexy out. For Christmas.

I think this is the same one I gave him. He's a reguster. Yeah well if you get in the may thing for his birthday, I'm a large.